The Mystical Autobiography of a Sephardic Woman from Salonika

Little is known about the upbringing or family life of the Salonikan author Reina bat Menaḥem ha-Kohen (Reyna Hakohén) beyond the few clues she gives in her autobiographical writings. From these texts we learn that she had seven siblings and that her father sent her to a Protestant missionary school for financial reasons. In other works, she implored fellow Ottoman Jews not to be too zealous in their attempts to “modernize,” a process she believed too often drove people toward materialism and a lapse in morals and religious observance; her 1898 article “Las muchachas modernas” (The Modern Girls) was challenged in the Ladino press for dissenting from modernizing calls for the full incorporation of Sephardic women into Jewish public life. In 1901, she published a commentary on the Book of Daniel (Comentario a Daniel, Salónica: Ets Hayim, 1901).